Secretarial/Clerical/Administrative Job Pretend and Public Speaking/Persuasion Activity for High School Students

 

Creative ideas sometimes come to me when I am half awake and half asleep. I had one of those today.

Job and/or Career Pretend Activities.

I am planning to sub for the high schools. Most of the time the teacher leaves behind an adequate lesson plan that keeps them busy the entire period, but for those off days, I have come up with a personal plan using materials I found on educational websites especially for high school students.

I like jobs, and careers, so I think High School is the perfect time to start thinking about and preparing for jobs after high school or college.

My activity will be to have about a 4 page article ready (copied from the educational sites) to be copied for the entire class. Actually this will be 2 activities, but time might not allow both activities in one class.

The first part of my activity will be to ask for 2 volunteers in the class, male or female, who are interested in working as administrative assistants, clerical assistants, or secretaries after high school or business school.

I will then ask for another volunteer who is interested in being either a teacher or a substitute teacher, male or female, to sit at the desk and keep order in the class while my secretaries and I go "somewhere" to make copies of this article. I will instruct the volunteer teacher to just keep order, and students may chat with each other quietly, but if things get out of hand, the volunteer teacher will take down names of the trouble makers, of which, when I return, I don't plan to do anything with unless of course a fist fight emerges and someone is injured, which I doubt will occur.

Then I will take my 2 secretaries to the main office, where I am hoping the secretary there can show them how to use the copier. I have used many copiers in my life, but it was years ago, and I am certain their copiers will be more up-to-date and CHANGED, so it will be best if I can gain the cooperation of someone in the main office to show my 2 secretaries how to make these copies for the rest of the class. I will instruct one of the secretaries to count students to know how many final copies we will need before we leave the class.

If we can get help somewhere in the building using a copier and perhaps even the girls themselves will be able to quickly operate the copier. I don't know how that will work out for us.

But in the activity, we will be pretending to work for whatever kind of company the article describes. I have copies now of several articles I can use. For example, one of my articles is about control and prevention of light pollution. So for that article, I will tell the secretaries they need to pretend they are secretaries working for a science lab and I am the head scientist of the project of how to control and/or prevent light pollution. At this point, the article is written by me, the head scientist, and these two volunteers are my assistants or secretaries making copies for us to present to our committees.

The correct number of copies will need to be made and then assembly of the article in correct sequence, and then stapled, so I will instruct them how to do this, and hope my instructions are clear enough to get all this done within a few minutes.

but.....time passes quickly when you are busy with something new or novel, so this phase may end before we can get back to the class that might end, and if it does, I will pick up the next time I am faced with FREE time in a class and go onto the second part of this activity/project.

The second phase of using this article will be a "pretend public speaking practice," for all students, as hopefully I will have now a copy to pass out to each student.

My plan here is to have each student with article in hand come in front of the class and read a couple of paragraphs to the class that I will tell them is "their peers in this science lab they are working for," and each student will pretend they wrote the article and are now presenting it to their peers for approval.

I will go down the row of students having them stand before the class and read a couple paragraphs, and then the next person will take up where the one before them left off.

This activity is to practice public speaking or persuasion communication skills.

If I am seeing this clearly, the article may have to be read at least twice for each student to get a chance to take ownership of the article and stand before the class reading, etc.

At the end of each article I have now one copy of and hopefully will get students to make copies of as I need them, are 3 or 4 questions, I will have a volunteer to ask the class or their peers, and just take a raise of hands to answer the questions.

The main objective of the practice is:

1. Secretarial/clerical/administrative job pretend
2. Public speaking and persuasion skills (trying to get your ideas accepted by people who can take action upon them).